Life drifting by the show-window … I too as much a part of life as the lobster, the fourteen carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult to establish the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill of lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb ruler of the roost. In the act of eating the host is violated and justice defeated temporarily. The plate and what’s on it, through the predatory power of the intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then absorbing it. The spiritual part of the being passes off like a scum, leaves absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage, vanishes, vanishes even more completely than a point in space after a mathematical discourse.
The fever, which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as the mercury in a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, which is what was to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls and spaghetti. To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see that even human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with clothes on, wiping the mouth with napkin, enables you to comprehend, what the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no other way of life possible, said wise men often, disdaining to use chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty deft of a street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts.
The meat balk devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24 carat sparkle and with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When is it life
, I ask myself, and why not now?
The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the comer the blind man stops again and plays “Home to Our Mountains”. I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket -1 chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong and I don’t belong.
I sit on the stoop for an hour or so, mooning. I come to the same conclusions I always come to when I have a minute to think for myself. Either I must go home immediately and start to write or I must run away and start a wholly new life. The thought of beginning a book terrifies me: there is so much to tell that I don’t know where or how to begin. The thought of running away and beginning all over again is equally terrifying: it means working like a nigger to keep body and soul together. For a man of my temperament, the world being what it is, there is absolutely no hope, no solution. Even if I could write the book I want to write nobody would take it -1 know my compatriots only too well. Even if I could begin again it would be no use, because fundamentally I have no desire to work and no desire to become a useful member of society.
I sit there staring at the house across the way. It seems not only ugly and senseless, like all the other houses on the street, but from staring at it so intently, it has suddenly become absurd. The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flop houses, screens, toilet paper, everything. Everything could just as well not be and not only nothing lost by a whole universe gained. I look at the people brushing by me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me. Supposing I intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question.
Supposing I just said to him suddenly: “Why do you go on living the way you do?” He would probably call a cop. I ask myself – does any one ever talk to himself the way I do? I ask myself if there isn’t something wrong with me. The only conclusion I can come to is that I am different. And that’s a very grave matter, view it how you will. Henry, I say to myself, rising slowly from the stoop, stretching myself, brushing my trousers and spitting out the gum. Henry, I say to myself, you are young yet, you are just a spring chicken and if you let them get you by the balls you’re an idiot because you’re a better man than any of them only you need to get rid of your false notions about humanity. You have to realize Henry me boy, that you’re dealing with cut-throats, with cannibals, only they’re dressed-up, shaved, perfumed, but that’s all they are – cut-throats, cannibals.
The best thing for you to do now. Henry, is to go and get yourself a frosted chocolate and when you sit at the soda fountain keep your eyes peeled and forget about the destiny of man because you might still find yourself a nice lay and a good dean lay will dean your ballbearing out and leave a good taste in your mouth whereas this only brings on dyspepsia, dandruff, halitosis, encephalitis. And while I’m soothing myself thus a guy comes up to me to bum a dime and I hand him a quarter for good measure thinking to myself that if I had had a little more sense I’d have had a juicy pork chop with that instead of the lousy meat balls but what the difference now it’s all food and food makes energy and energy is what makes the world go round. Instead of the frosted chocolate I keep walking and soon I’m exactly where I intended to be all the time, which is front of the ticket window of the Roseland. And now. Henry, says I to myself, if you’re lucky your old pal MacGregor will be here and first hell bawl the shit out of you for running away and then he’ll lend you a five-spot, and if you just hold your breath while climbing the stairs maybe you’ll see the nymphomaniac too and you’ll get a dry fuck. Enter very calmly.
Henry, and keep your eyes peeled! And I enter as per instructions on velvet toes, checking my hat and urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly redescending the stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered, perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably bored as hell and leg weary. Into each and every one of them, as I shuffle about, I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck and that’s why I’m reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no longer think about the condition of the world is marvellous. I mention it because for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good sized book before I woke up. Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it’ll take you. I mean a hundred or
